A Nation of Immigrants Is Half the Sentence, and the Other Half Matters

You know the moment. A conversation about immigration policy is moving along, someone raises a question about numbers, or about who should be admitted first, or about what the law says, and a voice across the table delivers the line: "We're a nation of immigrants." Then it goes quiet. The line is not offered as the start of a point. It is offered as the end of the discussion, a little like a referee blowing the whistle and walking off the field with the ball.

I want to take the whistle away from the referee. Not because the line is false. It is largely true, and I will say so plainly, and I will defend the people who say it from the charge that they are fools. I want to take the whistle away because a true statement can still be used as a trick, and this one is a trick when it is used as a complete sentence. It is half a sentence. The other half is the part that makes it a country.

The claim at its strongest

Let me give the argument in the form its best defenders would accept, since an argument you refuse to hear is an argument you cannot beat.

The phrase has a famous source. John F. Kennedy's short book A Nation of Immigrants appeared in 1958, when he was a senator, and was reissued in a revised edition after his death. The book told the story of waves of newcomers, from the English settlers to the Irish, Germans, Italians, Jews, Poles, Chinese and so many others, and argued that each wave faced suspicion and then contributed to the country. It was meant to be a corrective to a long habit of treating the latest arrivals as unfit for the club.

The case behind it is not silly. One, except for Native Americans, every American's family came from somewhere else, whether in 1620, 1850, 1910 or 1995. Two, each generation of arrivals was told it could not assimilate, and each generation did. Three, newcomers have built businesses, filled factories, farmed land, served in the military and taken the oath. Four, a country that forgets this story is a country that forgets itself. Five, therefore, the argument concludes, the burden should be on anyone who wants to restrict admission, because restriction contradicts who we are.

I accept the first four points. The fifth does not follow from them, and the whole debate lives in the gap.

Defining the terms

Point-by-point housekeeping first. "Immigrant" means a person who comes to live permanently in a country that is not his own. "Nation" is the harder word, and it is where the slogan quietly cheats.

A nation can mean a people bound by blood, language and ancestry. Many countries understand themselves that way, and the American founders did not. Or a nation can mean a people bound by shared commitments: to a founding document, a set of institutions, a language of public life, and the habit of governing themselves. That is the American meaning, and the Preamble to the Constitution states it in its first three words.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Notice what that sentence says. It is not "We the immigrants." It is "We the People," and it is a people who ordain a Constitution, with a purpose that includes "ourselves and our Posterity." A people that has bound itself by a constitution has a membership, and a membership has rules. You cannot have citizens without a line between citizen and non-citizen, and you cannot draw the line without deciding who may cross it and on what terms.

So the slogan has to be tested against the second word as well as the first. America is a nation of immigrants. It is also a nation of citizens, of laws, and of a people who decided to govern themselves. Both halves are true, and an argument that uses only one is a half-truth.

Why the slogan ends arguments

Here is how the trick works. Suppose I say that we should admit fewer people in one category, or select by skill, or enforce a law against employers who hire illegally. Someone replies, "We're a nation of immigrants." That reply does not address my proposal. It addresses a different one: whether America should have any immigrants at all. Nobody in the debate holds that position. Almost every conservative who writes about immigration, including the sharpest critics of current law, starts by saying that legal immigration is good and ought to continue. The dispute is about how many, who, in what order, and under what rules.

Imagine a debate over how fast to drive on a highway where someone answers, "We're a nation of drivers." True, and beside the point. Nobody wanted to ban driving. The question was the speed limit. The slogan sweeps the question of limits off the table by pretending it is the question of existence.

That is why I call it a conversation stopper. It turns an argument about rules into an argument about whether you like newcomers, and then it casts anyone with a question as someone who doesn't. A good-faith reader should resist being pushed into that corner, and good-faith people on the other side should stop pushing.

Limits are as old as the nation

Now the history, because the claim that numerical limits are un-American collapses when you look at the dates.

The first Congress did not leave citizenship open-ended. The Naturalization Act of 1790 set terms: a period of residence, good character, and an oath, and it limited naturalization to "free white persons," a restriction that was a moral blot and that the country later corrected by amendment and by statute. The point here is not the restriction's content but its structure. Congress used its Article I power, in Section 8, "To establish an Uniform Rule of Naturalization," to set conditions of membership. One Uniform Rule, How the First Congresses Wrote America's Naturalization Laws tells that story in detail.

For roughly the first century of the country, there were few federal numerical caps, mostly because there was little federal machinery for counting. In the 1880s Congress began to exclude particular groups, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which the Supreme Court upheld in the 1889 Chinese Exclusion Case on the ground that the power to exclude is an incident of national sovereignty. We should be honest that this chapter was driven in part by ugly prejudice, and that conservatives who admire the sovereignty principle need not admire its first application. The Chinese Exclusion Case and How the Court Found a Sovereign Power to Exclude looks at it directly.

The first general numerical limits came after the First World War. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 capped the number of immigrants from each country, and the Immigration Act of 1924 tightened and rewrote the system around national origins, with quotas weighted heavily toward Northern and Western Europe. Those laws embodied preferences I would not defend, and I say so without hedging: sorting people by their ancestry is not what a country founded on a creed should do. But notice what they were: numerical limits, passed by Congress, and signed by presidents, for most of the next forty years. The idea that limits are a recent betrayal of the national character does not survive the fact that for much of the twentieth century they were the national character's legal form.

In 1965 Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act amendments, which ended the national-origins quotas and replaced them with a system built on family ties and, to a smaller degree, skills, with overall limits that applied by hemisphere. Lyndon Johnson signed the bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. The law kept the idea of numerical limits while abandoning the ancestral formula. That is the system, in revised form, that we still argue about.

So here is the first numbered point of my rebuttal.

1. Limits are not the opposite of welcome. They are the way every generation of Americans has administered it. Every era that welcomed immigrants also set terms. A country that admits whoever arrives is not a nation of immigrants. It is a waystation.

The pause that taught something

Here is the point most often skipped in this debate, and it is the one that fascinates me. After the 1924 act, the share of the American population born abroad fell for decades. The foreign-born share had stood at roughly thirteen to fifteen percent in the Census counts from 1890 to 1910, and by 1970 it had dropped to under five percent. Historians of immigration have noticed what happened during those decades: the great immigrant communities of the earlier waves, the Italians, Poles, Jews, Irish and Germans, were not replenished by constant new arrivals, and their children and grandchildren moved into the common American life.

Be careful about what I am claiming, because the claim is modest. I do not say that the pause was good in every respect, since it was driven in part by the prejudices I just mentioned, and since it cost families years apart and shut the door on people who needed refuge. I say something narrower. The generations that grew up in that period had time to learn English, to serve in the same armed forces, to join the same unions and clubs and churches, and to become one people. The slogan treats assimilation as automatic. History says it takes time and it takes a pace the culture can absorb.

1. Assimilation is a project, not an accident, and pace matters to the project. A country that wants newcomers to become Americans has to give each wave time to become so. The Melting Pot Was a Good Idea and the Salad Bowl Is a Worse One makes the argument that the older ideal was the better one.

What the founders said about newcomers

The Founders were not of one mind, which is part of the point. They argued over how fast and how many, and over how long a newcomer should wait for citizenship. Hamilton, in 1802, defended a long residence requirement for naturalization in a series of newspaper essays answering Jefferson. What Washington, Hamilton and Jefferson Feared and Hoped About Newcomers walks through what they actually said.

What none of them did was treat membership as a formality. The Declaration of Independence lists among its grievances against the King that he had endeavoured to prevent the population of the states and obstructed the laws for naturalization of foreigners. The Founders considered naturalization an essential power of a self-governing people. They wanted it exercised by the people's representatives, not by the whim of a distant ruler. The Forgotten Immigration Grievance in the Declaration of Independence explains why that grievance mattered.

1. The Founders asserted the right of the people to set the terms of admission, and they said so in the Declaration itself. The slogan, taken as a complete sentence, quietly denies the right the Revolution was fought to claim.

Answering the strongest objection

The strongest objection is moral rather than historical. It says that most of us are here because someone in our family was let in, that it is a kind of ingratitude to pull up the ladder, and that the Statue of Liberty is not a monument to quotas.

I take that seriously, and I would put it this way. Gratitude is a good instinct, and the right response to gratitude is to keep the door open on fair terms, not to leave it unlatched. The people who came through Ellis Island did not come to an open frontier. They came through an inspection, with a physical exam, an interview about their means and intentions, and a real chance of being turned back. The memory of that line is part of the family story that the slogan likes to invoke. The Statue of Liberty was a gift about liberty, and the famous poem was added later to the pedestal, as The Statue of Liberty Was a Gift About Liberty, and the Poem Came Later describes. Neither one repealed the inspection line.

The deeper answer is that a ladder pulled up is different from a ladder with rungs. We can say yes to many people and also say that the yes has terms: lawful entry, an orderly queue, a reasonable pace, a commitment to the Constitution and the language of the country, and a path that ends in citizenship rather than a permanent status of lesser membership. Those terms are what make the invitation worth accepting. A club that admits everyone who shows up is not generous. It has stopped being a club.

1. Gratitude toward the people who let our families in is honored by running a system that is generous and orderly, not by pretending that order is cruelty.

The Lincoln test

Abraham Lincoln offered the best answer I know to the claim that blood makes a nation. In a speech in 1858, speaking of Americans whose ancestors had not been here at the Revolution, he said that when they look at the Declaration of Independence and see that all men are created equal, they feel that they are part of it, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood of the men who wrote it. I am paraphrasing from memory of the passage, so look up the exact words in the Lincoln-Douglas speech from July 1858 rather than trusting my phrasing. Lincoln's Electric Cord and the Case for a Civic Nation Anyone Can Join is the post for that.

That is the idea that makes the slogan's better half true. A person may become an American by adopting the creed. But adopting is an act, and an act requires an institution that receives it: a naturalization process, an oath, a country that has a people to join. The slogan wants the invitation without the institution. The honest version wants both.

A fairer way to say it

Here is a sentence I would be glad to see on every platform: "America is a nation of immigrants, and a nation of citizens, and a nation of laws, and we have always set the terms of admission ourselves." That sentence is longer. It is harder to wield as a club. It is also true, and it makes room for the actual debate, which is about numbers, skills, family, pace, enforcement and the quality of the welcome.

It also lets conservatives say something they sometimes forget to say aloud. We are for immigration that works: legal, orderly, merit-minded and assimilating, with a path to the oath for those who come in the front door. We are for a country confident enough to say yes to millions of people and confident enough to say no to unlawful entry. That is not the opposite of the Kennedy book's message. It is the other half of the sentence.

The case in brief

1. "A nation of immigrants" is true and incomplete: America is also a nation of citizens and laws, defined in the Preamble by "We the People."
2. Used as a complete sentence, the slogan ends arguments about limits, order and pace by treating them as arguments against immigration itself, which almost no one is making.
3. Limits on who may enter and become a citizen are as old as the Constitution's naturalization power, and numerical limits since 1921 and the national-origins era were wrongly built on ancestry but show that limits and welcome have always coexisted.
4. Assimilation takes time and institutions, and the decades after 1924 show that a slower pace let earlier waves become one people.
5. The better answer is a generous, orderly, lawful system with a path to citizenship, not an open door or a closed one.

What you can do: read the Preamble and Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 on the Constitution page, then try the civics test that new citizens take, and bring the whole sentence to your next conversation about immigration.